Queens Boulevard

Paths to power on “Wolf Hall” and “The Casual Vacancy.”

Thomas Cromwell is a hero not because he’s virtuous but because he has no illusions.

Illustration by Conor Langton

Once upon a time, before “The Sopranos” broke the monopoly, PBS was America’s primary source for prestige television. With little competition, the network perfected that brand, as exemplified by “Masterpiece Theatre,” an oracular phrase used without irony and with a kind of innocence. The network’s costume dramas might let you commune with genius, the logo hinted: they’d improve and elevate you, like a lecture at the 92nd Street Y. But, as TV drama grew out of its insecurities, the PBS lineup, despite small charmers, like “Call the Midwife,” began to seem stuffy, snoozy, and rather silly, an artifact of a time when the medium had to put on airs. “Wolf Hall,” the BBC adaptation of two Booker Prize-winning novels by Hilary Mantel, looked ominously like the same old, same old: a costume drama set in sixteenth-century England, scored to classical music, starring actors with faces like romantic ruins—yet another relic wheeled out of the vault.

Instead, the show’s deliberately paced six hours turn out to be riveting, precisely because they are committed, without apology or, often, much explanation, to the esotericism of their subject matter. (“Riveting” is what you call shows like this when you enjoy them; “dense” is what you say when you don’t.) Once I got comfortable with hitting Pause and consulting Wikipedia as needed, I found the series beginning to expand and deepen, intensifying with each episode. As it happens, “Wolf Hall” matches up perfectly with a more modern style of quality TV, since it’s a portrait of a dark, conflicted antihero—Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance), a shrewd fixer of the Tudor era. Like so many of TV’s strategic geniuses, from Don Draper to Francis Underwood, Cromwell was a class jumper: the abused son of a Putney blacksmith, he transformed himself into a worldly man, a sort of internationalist MacGyver. At once a financial whiz, a legal genius, and a hard-knuckled mercenary, Cromwell could “draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury,” Mantel writes. In the book, Cromwell’s mentor and father figure, Cardinal Wolsey, describes him as “rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes,” but the TV Cromwell is less a thug than a surgeon, severing Henry VIII from his first wife, England from Rome, and, eventually, Anne Boleyn from her head. He’s a hero not because he’s virtuous but because he has no illusions, unlike his mirror self, the preening idealist Thomas More, a torturer and a religious fanatic who insists that he’s the good guy.

Mantel’s books “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” are embedded in Cromwell’s cautious, clever, pragmatic consciousness, which makes them virtuoso psychological portraits rather than action-packed potboilers. Any adaptation must flip Mantel’s story inside out, rendering it external, and the director Peter Kosminsky and the screenwriter Peter Straughan don’t fall into some obvious traps, like revealing Cromwell’s thoughts via voice-over, by now a television cliché. They also don’t go in for much exposition or explicitly libidinal kicks, à la Showtime’s “The Tudors,” rarely showing us the sex that’s on every character’s mind. Instead, we are privy to something realistically ugly: a hellscape of gossip, dominated by old men making mean remarks about the miscarriages of potential queens.

Instead, Kosminsky doubles down on the most alien qualities of the period, using hypnotic closeups and quietly formal frames, presenting burnished, candlelit images that resemble paintings from the era, along with some of the more memorable hats in TV history. The viewer is forced to reckon with the setting’s luxurious airlessness, its high-risk intimacies, in which eye contact and ill-conceived jokes are as treacherous as any war with France. Cromwell lingers on the periphery, like the world’s most dangerous therapist: he observes, and calculates, and shuts up while everyone else babbles and confesses. (In the later episodes, as the dominoes begin to fall, Cromwell bears some resemblance to “Breaking Bad” ’s Mike Ehrmantraut, another manly fixer with a poker face.)

The main plot features a long-con revenge scenario, as Cromwell, in the course of many years, seeks to avenge the shabby treatment of Wolsey—although, oddly, this surrogate-father dynamic is the one relationship that doesn’t quite translate from the book, despite the likable performance of Jonathan Pryce as Wolsey. In service of this story line, Kosminsky uses one rather cheesy visual motif: repeated flashbacks to a carnival at which masked nobles cruelly mock Wolsey, the sort of “Remember this?” flashback that has become way too common in recent TV dramas, from “The Newsroom” to “Empire.” (If you can trust us to keep this many people named Thomas straight, you can trust us to remember a motivating incident from only two episodes back.)

But such small weaknesses are outweighed by the potency of other relationships, which feel rich and terrifying—the Tower of London looms behind even the most innocent chitchat. There’s the Frog-and-Toad companionship of Cromwell and More (the terrific Anton Lesser), two philosophical rivals who trade undermining remarks but share a long history and a mutual respect. There’s the fragile closeness of Cromwell and Henry, who is played by Damian Lewis as a strutting, lusty paranoiac, a mercurial jock who gradually degenerates into his worst self. Best of all, there’s the peculiar affinity between Cromwell and the ambitious Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy), a knight’s daughter who has convinced the King that she’s his soul mate, despite the opposition to their relationship from almost every other person on the planet, from the Queen, the Pope, and More to the impressively high proportion of the British population that views her as a demonic floozy.

Although Rylance gives a skilled performance, the surprise center of “Wolf Hall” is the wonderful Foy, who plays Anne as a gambler who knows that her body is her currency. Pearls framing her cleavage, eyes narrowed, chin high, she seems eternally aware that she’s being watched, because she’s stuck inside a truly insane system, a reproductive panopticon in which all that matters is the illusion of virginity and the emergence of a male heir, as wombs are traded like unstable derivatives. At moments, she’s the ultimate Rules Girl (“She’s selling herself by the inch,” her sister, Mary, notes). Yet she’s also legitimately seductive, witty, and tough—you can see Cromwell admiring her even when she drives him mad. “I was always desired,” she explains at one point. “But now I’m valued, you see? And that’s different.”

In one scene, the fixer and the aspiring queen stand side by side at a window, and he allows himself a brief reverie: as she lifts her face in profile, unmoving, he strokes her neck—a moment that doubles as an erotic fantasy and a death threat. Then the fantasy ends, and the two gaze down at the courtyard, watching Thomas More resign from his position as Lord Chancellor, a ceremonial moment that they know will have huge repercussions. “Soon you’ll have friends everywhere,” Anne remarks, as they negotiate who should take More’s place. It’s a cold arbitration, yet the scene is peculiarly playful, all smiles of recognition, glances, and warm grins—two policy wonks playing chess.

“So that’s it? More is out?” Anne says. “Shall we go down?”

Cromwell bursts out laughing, and says, “You can’t resist it.”

“No more can you,” she says. Then Anne reaches over to place her jewelled hand on his. Maybe it’s seduction, but it looks like game recognizing game.

HBO’s “The Casual Vacancy” is another British-made literary adaptation about sexual hypocrisy and class snobbery, this one set in a modern English village called Pagford. Based on J. K. Rowling’s first novel for adults, it opens with the sudden death of a progressive councilman, Barry Fairbrother, who advocates for social services, like a methadone clinic. Before Barry has even been buried, his seat becomes the focus of competition among three local candidates: a gormless rich boy, an even more gormless school administrator, and a malevolent bully who is nothing but gorm. The town may be picturesque, with its cobblestones and its ancient abbey, but it’s full of Babbitts and vipers, junkies and yuppies, and, in Rowling’s biting portrait, there’s no way to escape the small-town claustrophobia. Once the town’s teens begin to post their parents’ secrets online, the repercussions are dire, even without the option of beheadings.

Sarah Phelps’s screenplay performs major surgery, not just in plot but in tone: it excises the saddest bits of Rowling’s book, making it about thirty-five per cent less tragic. Phelps also trims characters, turns strangers into family members, and simplifies the plot, which in the book deals with the rather abstruse question of whether to rezone a poor community adjacent to Pagford. In the TV show, a pair of venal richies (Michael Gambon and Julia McKenzie, having a blast) scheme to turn a quietly useful community center into a lucrative destination spa. The result is a warmer story, streaked with satire rather than marinated in it. Perhaps the greatest contribution comes from the performance of someone who barely appears: Rory Kinnear (best known as the Prime Minister in the pig episode of “Black Mirror”), whose Barry is a poignant, meaningful figure, a do-gooder whose loss is real for the town’s most vulnerable residents.

Also excellent is Abigail Lawrie, as Krystal, the Anne Boleyn of Pagford. In her first scene, Lawrie, in short shorts, eyes flashing, struts into a large room full of mocking schoolmates, upending her audience with bravado. To the town elders, Krystal is merely the skank daughter of a junkie. She seduces sons; she sinks property values. But, in the course of three episodes, we begin to see the world through her eyes, and this change, rather than making the story treacly, makes it angrier, earning any agitprop. We’re living in an age of political dramas, many of which celebrate the dream of lifting the scepter, the thrill of a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. There’s something refreshing about this story’s furious smallness, which treats an addict’s need for food and transportation with the seriousness of some regal jock’s Italian divorce. ♦

Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s television critic, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.